Erja Laakkonen (°1976, Savo, Finland) is an artist who mainly works with contemporary strategies. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, her conceptual artworks references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her conceptual artworks demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, she often creates work using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo transubstantiation.
Her works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, she makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
Her works are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role.
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